


Warning: Fluff (in the sense of filamentous integumentary structures)

by melannen



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: Crack, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs with feathers, Explicit Language, Fluff, Gen, Imprinting, Needs More Dinosaurs!, baby animal, doctor who cameos, gratuitous adorableness, ttio_kinkmeme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-26 12:24:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt from the ttoi_kinkmeme: Malcolm's time-traveling friend once brought him back a present from the past: a T-rex egg. Once the creature hatches, it "imprints" on Malcolm, seeing the rough vicious spin doctor as the mummy it never had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Warning: Fluff (in the sense of filamentous integumentary structures)

"Malcolm?" Sam asked, cautiously pushing open his office door with one hand.

"Sam," Malcolm replied tonelessly. "What did I tell you?"

"That if it wasn't farted directly from the asshole of God, you didn't want to hear about it today. But I thought a tunnel of swirly white light and some remarkably nasty sound effects might have been close enough." She held up the box that had been decanted out of the tunnel onto her desk. It was a white cube, just a bit larger than you would need for a coffee mug, with a label pasted on it for Malcolm Tucker, London, Earth. It wasn't made out of any material she could identify.

"Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me, Jesus Christ," Malcolm said, but he seemed mostly exasperated, so Sam decided she'd been right in assuming it had something to do with one of his contacts in the UNIT crowd. "Bring it here."

She put in on his desk and he ran a finger around the edge until he'd figured out how to open it. There was a card under the lid; he read it, muttered "Fuck you, you giant fucking poofs, both of you fuckers," and dropped it to dig into the filmy white packing material.

Sam picked up the card and turned it over, curiously. In old-fashioned looping handwriting, it read, "M- Just a small thanks for the loan of your trained killer. Jamie said you'd always wanted one and that you need someone to look after you, so it seemed the thing to do. Yours as ever, Harold Saxon."

Well, that sort of explained why Jamie hadn't come around much lately. Sam frowned. "Isn't Harold Saxon meant to be dead?"

"It's a long fucking story," Malcolm said, finally lifting the gift out of the box. It was a round ovoid object, about the size of an ostrich egg but more elongated, decorated with organic-looking striations down the long axis. He put it on the desk in front of him and glared.

It started to rock back and forth.

 

***

Nicola Murray returned from her summer holiday to find all of her staffers gathered around Terri's desk. They were apparently admiring something, going by the noises they were making. She went over to investigate.

There was an animal on Terri's desk. It was about the size of a large pigeon, although its size was hard to judge, because it mostly looked like a ball of fluff, covered in reddish-brown down that looked softer than a baby chick's.

"Terri," Nicola asked, drawing a collection of sheepish greetings as they all finally noticed her arrival, "Why do you have a baby bird?"

"It's not mine," Terri assured her.

Olly reached out a finger to poke at it, and a scaly-looking beak emerged from the fuzz to snap at him. "Ow! Shit!" he said. "That's not a fucking bird!" A V-shape of minuscule punctures on his finger was welling up with drops of blood as two beady black eyes glared at him. Nicola realized that what she'd taken for a beak was a mouth filled with tiny, sharp teeth.

"Smart boy," said a far-too-familiar voice, emerging from the private office. Nicola turned to see, of course, Malcolm Tucker, slipping his Blackberry into a pocket. "It's not a bird. It's a juvenile non-avialian fucking theropod."

"Oh, right," Terri said. "Nicola, Malcolm's here to welcome you back, he was just taking a call."

"I got that, thanks. That doesn't answer my question about the non-avialian fucking theropod."

"Yes, sorry about that, Nicola," said Malcolm. "If you'll give me a moment, I'll deal with this, and then we can get to business."

Nicola made a be-my-guest gesture with one hand, and Malcolm leaned both hands on the desk, almost looming over the poor creature. "How the fuck did you get up here?" he asked it, his voice oddly several tones quieter than it usually was. "How the fucking fuck did you get out of the fucking car, am I going to have to feed you on the shredded intestines of that fucking incompetent driver like I promised him? Of course we still haven't fucking figured out how you got into the fucking car in the first place, you little shit. What did I tell you when I left you in the office? Oh yes, that's right," he said, his voice rising into more typical tones, "FUCK OFF!"

The creature stared at him for a moment, entirely unruffled. It tilted its head to one side, very birdlike, and then stretched its neck out and made a single high-pitched clucking sound, almost like a chicken's, but not quite.

Nicola choked. "Did it just --"

"Aww, the little darling's learnt her name already," Terri cooed.

"You can fuck off too," Malcolm told Terri, as he straightened up. As soon as he was fully upright, the creature leapt up onto his shoulder, a standing jump of several feet, gripping the rich material of his coat in muscular-looking talons. Nicola noticed then that both of his shoulders were looking a bit tattered, but he just inclined his head to her and said, "Nicola. Can we talk somewhere privately?"

Nicola glanced from the creature's flat, reptilian stare to Malcolm's almost identical expression, and decided that perhaps it would be in the best interest of her survival to swallow any further comment. "Yes, of course," she said instead. "I'm, ah, I'm quite looking forward to getting caught up on all that's happened here during my holiday."

***

Julius Nicholson stood outside Malcolm's office and frowned. He was well aware that Sam wasn't going to let him in, and to be perfectly honest he had no business here important enough to justify it, but he was a wee bit worried. There'd been the oddest rumours coming out of the communications office of late, and from here by Sam's desk he could hear what sounded like a steady litany of muttered curses emerging from the interior. "Sotto voce doesn't tend to be his sort of thing, is all," he said aloud.

Sam gave him an assessing look. "All right. I'll let you see in, on two conditions: First, you don't make any sound while the door's open. One peep and you'll wish it was Malcolm who had his hands on you. And second, you don't go telling anyone what you see."

Julius gave his acquiescence; at any rate, his curiosity had far outpaced his concern by the time Malcolm's PA slowly eased his door open. The man himself sat slumped back in his chair, clearly asleep, looking every bit as cadaverous in rest as in animation; Julius understood Sam's caution, then, for moments when Malcolm allowed himself rest were rare enough. As for the rest of it - nestled in Malcolm's lap, one of his hands nearly buried in its soft, rust-brown fluff, was a baby animal. He could see Malcolm's hand rising and falling with its breath, and with every exhale, it made a sneezy sort of clucking sound. Julius raised his eyebrows. That was what he'd been hearing?

Sam gave him an eloquent look, and then carefully closed the door again.

"Sam," Julius breathed. "I never thought to say this about Malcolm of all people -- but that was adorable."

"I know," Sam agreed, sitting back down. "And from what I've been reading, it'll be at least two or three years until she's big enough to bite the heads off his enemies." She leaned wistfully on one arm. "Until then, I imagine we'll just have to endure repetitions of that sort of scene."

**Author's Note:**

> This has been somewhat jossed by that one fucking Doctor Who episode where [THE COELUROSAURS DIDN'T HAVE FEATHERS WTF](http://melannen.dreamwidth.org/292980.html), so we're assuming that over the course of Earth's future and past, there have been multiple attempts to resurrect or engineer dinosaurs, and some of them are more or less similar to what the original Mesozoic dinosaurs were. This one just happens to be more scientifically accurate than the ones on that ark. :P
> 
> More multimedia: Little Fuck-Off looks something like this, at least until she gets older: [Baby Tyrannosaur](http://www.redbubble.com/people/nanoraptor/works/3889289-baby-tyrannosaur) , and sounds something like this: [The Dirty Chicken](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stXWBbMZhR0).


End file.
